The PC Gamer article linked on Notch’s Blog says that the Ghasts are pretty rare and aren’t very good at aiming so you can avoid them pretty easily, and a few times none even showed up.
The block from hell appears like it would actually be a good idea, the flaming rock only takes one hit to pop with a diamond pick, so you could get a stack of that stuff and jump back to the safe side without even having to worry too much about dying.
I’m still a little worried about lanterns, ESPECIALLY with the new “the lower you go the darker you need” mechanic though.
What if you don’t have a diamond pick, though? I have one, but it took forever to mine enough diamonds to craft it. (I don’t ever carry it with me, either – it’s sole use is for mining obsidian.) BTW, diamond shovels rock.
As for ghasts, if they’re as rare as slimes, it’s unlikely that I’ll ever meet one…
Yeah, that part is really gonna be a problem…it makes perfect sense for dark monster caverns, but mobs should NOT spawn in a bedrock-level mine I dug myself! I’m preparing by spamming torches all over my diamond mines, no less than 4 spaces apart…but if that’s not enough to prevent spawns, I’ll probably go postal or something.
When I first go into Hell, I am so going to go in there with a bunch of rock blocks- so I can build a nice, safe tunnel around me to wherever I want my exit point to be. I like the idea of extra-dimensional fast travel, but I don’t like there being monsters when I do it.
And for the record, I *hate *the idea of monsters spawning in brighter areas as you go deeper down.
I don’t think that’ll work, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that I’m 99% certain that monsters in the Slip can spawn in any arbitrary location. If you’re really that worried you may as well turn it to peaceful any time you go through the gate.
Besides, 16 blocks for every 1 is a LOT. Even if 6 ghasts happen to spawn due to Sod’s law, keep in mind that going a mere 64 blocks will bring you 1024 away. That means that if you consider each block a yard, a mere 110 (not “short” but not exactly a tall order) blocks is mile. I’m pretty sure I could survive anything short of a wall of creepers with skellies on some ramparts around me if I only had to move 32 blocks to be rid of the danger and be far enough to likely be entirely out of sight of my start point.
Though going through the Slip raises some interesting conundrums. I almost want to test the following:
You have two gates, two spaces apart. Hell only exists one in every 16, how does this translate? Will it glompf the gates into one? Which one do you exit from if that’s true?
16 blocks away is a filled in hill, you make a gate from the Slip and exit. What happens? Is the Slip a mapping of the real worlds? How does this mapping work? Is there a block in 16 squares if there’s a block 16 squares in the real world? Is each block defined by a “contraction” i.e. how many/what type of blocks exist there in the 16x16x16 box represented by the space? What if you place or remove a block in The Slip and build a gate there? Will a 16x16 block suddenly appear out of nowhere in the real world, or 16x16 be destroyed if you remove it?
There’s a lot of stuff you can test here, I imagine all of it will end up being pretty boring, like the gate simply choosing the nearest available surface in the real world and such, but it makes me curious.
None of the existing monsters will attack through walls- not even Creepers, which is kind of a shame. They can sense you, but they won’t attack until they can directly reach you.
Creepers explode if they get within a block of you, which having a block between you prevent. Skeletons don’t do it because they can’t hit you anyway. We’ve never had a mob who can attack “through” walls like this at range (i.e. doesn’t trigger by being next to you). Doesn’t mean you’re not right, of course, but I think it’s a foreseeable possibility that they’ll attack through walls.
In other news… Angel Island (named in honor of the Sonic games) is done! I think it turned out much more impressive than I expected it to be. I ended up with about 4 stacks of leftover dirt (which may sound like a lot, but go ahead and count how many above for you have. I wasted a lot). It took a lot of effort to get looking JUST right, but I got it just right. There are a few things that may be added or changed later, but for now I’m very happy with the results.
Photobucket album of pics. Only 12 of them, but they should get the feel across nicely:
ETA: Some of them are under construction photos, which ones they are should be obvious, but not everything you see is what ended up being in the final state. I logged on today to finish it and thought “why did I go all the way down again?” I managed to make it look natural enough that it fooled me! I gave myself a pat on the back, which I rarely do.
Tonight I spent several hours down in my bedrock-level mine, adding more torches to prevent post-update spawns. Turns out that I’d accidentally dug several “branches” in the wrong place, so I had to tear down half the mine and start over! :smack:
The mine’s turning a nice profit, but I’m still woefully short on iron…I have more GOLD than iron right now!
In one of the deepest shafts I could hear a skeleton just beyond the wall…followed by the “tssssss” of him falling into lava. That was satisfying.
I was making one of those canal systems for gathering pigs/cows/etc and dumping them into a lava machine. Was doing OK, but I realized that my collection point was just under the surface, so if I stood there to collect, the 24-block no-spawn zone would take out a chunk of useable area.
So I was extending the collection canal sending it both down and away. I was standing in the water while doing it, which means when I was dropping a level, I was mining directly below.
Yeah, I should know better.
Amusingly, since I was in the water, it came with me, which broke my fall. So I swam back up–and promptly blocked the water flow forgetting that there’s not actually anything under me. Ouch.
Bizarre area–where I got dumped wasn’t all that big, but I went and grabbed some coal in the floor, and promptly opened into a second cave right beneath it. And when looking around that area, I mined some iron in the wall and broke into a third cave–this one including the biggest lava pool I’ve ever seen outside of the Hell videos (great, I find massive amounts of lava source blocks two days before we get a near-infinite supply).
Very strange area–multiple caves all separated by really thin walls/floors, and very mineral rich–I wasn’t set up to really go mining, but a lot of gold/diamond ore in plain sight, and I grabbed over 2 stacks of iron just casually looking around.
But now I have a nice waterfall drop for my collector, easily below the 24-block radius to the surface.
MineCraft and the round door comment reminds me of all the fun I had with the Build engine way back in the day. Sure, the possibilities with modern engines are greater, but all of the complexity necessary for that removes a lot of the accessibility and thereby the fun.
I was confused by this at first as well. To get obsidian it’s not water + lava. It’s water (running or still) + lava SOURCE block*. Running lava only gives you cobblestone, as you discovered. As such, making an obsidian farm is basically useless. Minecraft wiki tells you how to do it with a 7 or 8 block trough, but if you’re gonna bother to get 8 lava source blocks in a bucket you may as as well save yourself the time and/or iron and just drop a bucket of water NEXT TO (not on, or you’ll lose the water) a lava lake in a mine or cave. Remember that obsidian requires a diamond pick, and that it takes 25-30 second to mine one block, so don’t give up halfway through because you think it’s not working.
Sidenote: You may, at this point, get the idea to create an “infinite lava spring” like you do with that 2x2 pool of water. Unfortunately, there is a finite amount of lava sources in each chunk, there are no mechanics for an “ocean” of lava (as of the current, pre-Halloween version, this may change to make Hell easier to generate). Therefore dropping any combination of any amount of lava in any pattern will never give you more potential obsidian than you started with (though there used to be a bug involving vertical streams, but it was unconfirmed). I guess you could make a cobblestone factory, but if you can’t find any cobblestone, you’re probably doing it wrong.
…says the person who ran out of DIRT, fer crimeny’s sake.
Tonight I started work on a new branch mine, inside the mountain where I plan to build my glass/lava tower someday. (I named it Glass Mountain, which became appropriate after placing dozens of windows where the branch tunnels met air.) The mountain yielded its riches, and in just a few hours I’d mined 200+ coal and over 50 IRON…finally, I can get started on my minecart network! Oh, and I’m also officially set for life regarding [del]torches[/del] lanterns.
Yesterday I roofed over an area with glass and dug a wide, deep shaft with a 2-block wide ramp winding down the rim. Standing at the bottom and seeing that circle of daylight waaay up there is cool.
I’d already dug my way into a natural cave system at the bottom, cleared the nearest part, installed some doors, and set it up as a secondary workshop/storage space. I went exploring the rest of the cavern today, or at least a good sized area of it. After a time I worked my way down to a good sized region that was a series of interconnected caverns filled with waterfalls and lava; rather cool. Also mineral rich; I got quite a bit of iron & gold, gobs of coal and even some diamond.
I had an amusing stroke of good luck when I set out to get obsidian for a Hellgate from those lava & water caves. My first try just turned some lava to cobblestone; I dug it out of the way and surprise! Out pops another waterfall. It flowed over the lava and extinguished it; when I put a stone block down to shut the water off I discovered I now had 30 blocks worth of obsidian, mostly by accident.
(1) The Halloween Update is being released just before midnight, Swedish time, which for USA’ians means this afternoon or later tonight (10/30).
(2) The update will NOT break any current saves, but you should make backups JIC.
(3) Biomes are in, but will only work with newly generated chunks.
(4) Fishing is in (hooray!)
(5) The much maligned torch/lantern change will most likely NOT be in the patch – Notch hasn’t had time to finish it yet. It’s coming someday, though.
(6) Pumpkins may or may not make it in time (too bad, since it’s a Halloween patch…)
(7) Can’t think of what to say here, but I had to write something since 7 is my favorite number.
